Nazarbayev and the Making of Kazakhstan: From Communism to Capitalism

At the height of the Brezhnev period, when the Soviet system seemed
politically secure and economically stable, a new theory emerged to
excite the hopes of Kremlinologists: that Islam would be the force
that undermined the evil empire. The impetus came from two French
academics, Alexandre Bennigsen and Hélène Carrère d’Encausse,
archetypal representatives of a profession always given to a strong
element of wishful thinking, alongside hatred and resentment, in part
because it was dominated by émigrés and their children. Bennigsen’s
Islam in the Soviet Union (1967) and Carrère d’Encausse’s L’Empire
éclaté (1978) argued that the five Central Asian republics were the
Soviet Union’s soft underbelly. Their large Muslim populations had
retained a distinct political consciousness, they claimed, in spite of
five decades of Sovietisation, and thanks to a high birthrate their
numbers were increasing faster than those of the majority Slavs.
Zbigniew Brzezinski and other US Sovietologists in the Carter
administration eagerly took up the theory of a demographic time-bomb
and funding was increased for Western radio broadcasts into Central
Asia in the hope of exploiting Islam’s anti-Soviet potential.